(My Bike Rally Blog will be continued shortly. Patience! There's a lot there! Check below for Day Three Pictures and Story. But I just HAD to throw this in....)
I caught a review of this movie awhile back, and my knee jerk reaction to rave reviews is to run from them, but the premise for this movie sounded intriguing; an inner-city junior high school teacher with a drug habit forms an unlikely friendship with one of his students after she discovers his secret. “Whoa!” I thought to myself, “That sure as hell ain’t “Goodbye Mr.Chips”.
So I went down to the Varsity today and caught the matinee with my friend Stephanie, whose critical eye is sharper than mine, and thought, let’s see what SHE thinks. In short, she was blown away, as was I.
To begin with, if this movie doesn’t make Ryan Gosling a bonafied SERIOUS movie-star of the Adrien Brody, Heath Ledger variety, then I’ll eat one of Hedda Hopper’s hats. (Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.) The same can be said no less for his young co-star Shareeka Epps, who is simply stunning. This young actress can convey more emotion with absolute stillness in her face than most actors can with two pages of dialogue.
Apart from the two lead performances, the script was one of the best written original screenplays I’ve seen in years. The dialogue was terse, to the point and unbelaboured. Screenwriter Anna Boden should be seriously held up as a national resource out in Hollywood. This woman can write, (and edit no less!) and God knows, they can use that out there. Kudos must also go to director Ryan Fleck, who never let the pace flag and kept us tensely on the edge of our seats the entire time. He managed that near impossible feat of keeping us sympathetic to largely unsympathetic characters. He doesn’t excuse or condemn his characters' failings, and doesn’t present them with any bias or judgement, he lets the audience figure them out for themselves. How refreshing to have a piece of art assume the audience has a brain.
That being said, I do have a bit of a beef with the penultimate scene, where it all comes colliding together, in that the music score kept intruding on the action of the scene, which was very delicate. I thought the whole scene played in silence would have been much more effective than having the score try to manipulate me into how it thought I should feel about what was happening. But that was my only complaint. The rest of the movie was magical.
One of the lovely things about this movie (in a sea of lovely things) was that none of it was predictable. You really couldn’t see what was coming around the corner next. You knew Dan (Gosling’s character) was inevitably going to crash somehow, and you knew Drey (Epps’ character) was going to have some major decisions to make at a very young age about how she was going to live her life. You just didn’t know how or why. Every time you saw a scene being played out and you thought, “Oh God, this is gonna happen, why is he/she doing THAT?” something would come along to flip the whole thing on its ear, and never once come close to straining the credibility of the story. The screenplay is brilliantly plotted and never flags. If Boden doesn’t win the Oscar for best original screenplay this year, the Academy should be officially declared incompetent and sent to the Knots Landing Home for the Officially Obtuse.
The performances, well, my God, I could go on for hours about the performances. Gosling is a revelation. Absolutely consistent, even in his ugliest moments. There are moments he has where you marvel at the depths he’s plumbing in this character’s freefall. We’re never told why Dan is an addict, we only know that he is. Later on, when we see him at a family dinner, and watch his parents gleefully put away the wine and scotch at a clip that would fell Joan Crawford and Ernest Hemingway respectively, you realize without ever being told that Dan’s addiction is perfectly natural, he grew up with addicts, why on earth shouldn't he be one? The only difference is that being an alcoholic is only slightly more socially acceptable than being a crack head. Like his rambling dissertations on dialecticals to his classes, its only a question of degrees, otherwise, there’s very little difference in their lives. It doesn't belabour this point, or even make it a plot point. Its simply an observation of his life. Like everything in this movie, it makes no judgements.
Dan is a good teacher, and he likes what he does, he’s inventive and the kids obviously like and respect him. He’s the girl’s basketball coach, and he’s passionately involved with these kids’ welfare. He cares about them. Likewise, Drey is a tough kid, but sensitive and generous to the plight of her overworked mother. She doesn't blame her for never being there, nor does she blame anyone, she merely offers that "Nobody has to worry about me." as she can take care of herself. She does it without self-pity, because she knows she really has no choice. But she's still a young girl who is desperately lonely, and realizes that through his haze, Dan is desperately lonely too. They make a contact of sorts after she discovers him using in the girl's locker room after a dismal basketball game, and they become spiritual cohorts. Like Forster's Malabar Caves, they are two lost souls who hear each others' resonant echoes of anguish and loneliness.
One rather disturbing moment comes at a dance when Dan charmingly gets this tough young girl to dance, but then appears to be unable to let go of her, taken by surprise it seems by the revelation that he needs her as much as she needs him. The point that he is her teacher and a grown man and she's his student and a young girl, pushes the uncomfortable incongruity of their relationship even further to the edge. He is aware that she's a kid, and berates her at one point for not leaving him alone, and she is aware on some subconscious level that his worry for her may be self-serving and may not be entirely healthy (his attempted rape of a colleague he is dating later on bares this out all too disturbingly) and she keeps her distance. In doing so, she makes the closer acquaintance of Frank, the local dealer who landed her brother in jail. She turns to him because he is paternal, the big brother she's lost, and the sort of older male figure whom she cannot seem to do without. Drey's fate depends on whether she can choose between the stability of Frank who is amoral, or the instability of Dan, who is disintegrating, yet fundamentally decent. In having the two push and pull on either side of her, the crucible of the girl's character is annealed. She is the strongest character in the film, and ultimately the one character who makes a choice in determining their fate.
Dan's disintegration is the map of the film and to watch it is alternately horrific and fascinating. In his brief homecoming with his suburban family, we see that his parents are ex-hippies who are passionately interested in civil rights and demonstrations, and are in fact the seemingly progressive yuppie parents who once thought they could change the world. They love their kids, and are apparently happy. The mother is oblivious to her son’s pain, assuming he is happy because he tells her he is, not bothering to notice through her wine glaze that he is disintegrating in front of her eyes. His father sees something amiss, but cannot face it because it is all too evident that the same demons lurk within him. The man has to load himself up on enough Scotch before he can even mumble to his son that he loves him. These people say they have passionate convictions, but that’s a lie. They anesthetise themselves to avoid feeling anything at all, indeed, one gets the feeling that they’re terrified of feeling anything or facing the truth about themselves for fear of what they might dredge up. In that sense, Dan’s drug addiction is perfectly normal. He’s grown up learning that numbing the senses is what you do when the pain of life gets too intense; you dull it, however you can. The genius (and I use the word advisedly) of this film is that it gives you all of this in such subtle ways that you really don’t grasp all of it until long after the film is over.
Gosling’s haunted eyes and slurred staccato speech belie the warmth of someone who actively gives a damn even while he’s destroying himself. Likewise, Epps' portrayal of Drey’s fortress of defences make her unbearable loneliness even that more poignant. When she steels herself to ask her teacher for a ride home because the child can’t face one more day of going back to an empty apartment, its enough to make one weep at the sheer courage on her face, trying to mask that naked need. Out of such moments is art made.
Go see this movie. Indy films being what they are, it probably won’t be out for long, so do yourself a favour and gobble it up fast while its here. In this summer fare of lightweight fluff, this movie of searing intensity and wit is to be savoured and remembered. I keep thinking of what the famous movie director Vincent Minnelli said, when asked about movies, he noted that "if a movie doesn’t haunt you for awhile after you’ve seen it, then it can’t have meant very much." By that estimation, and judging by most of the audience who sat riveted to their seats as the last credits rolled, Half Nelson means very much indeed.
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